odds n' ends
どこでもいいよ
I finished my last class of undergrad recently. It was a little uneventful, a little boring. The professor spoke about the brightness of our futures, that there was no need to be sad for our parting despite the current times, though I don’t recall anyone on the Zoom call actually being sad. The wrong season, perhaps.
Parting probably shares the same color as summer’s end instead: afternoon sunlight streaming through the leaves, a drawstring hat gently carried by the wind. There is a sense of loss here that I can’t seem to place, a certain notion of finality. Sometimes, I miss the lazy summer days where I sat by the windowsill and binged One Piece, the Percy Jackson series, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Or maybe parting has the hue of trains. I remember the incredible sense of sadness I felt when I rewatched the scene when Chihiro boarded the train with No Face to find Zenibaba, accompanied by Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful “The sixth station.” Or the time Taichi and the gang waved goodbye as the train carried them back to the real world. Perhaps parting is only sad in retrospect. It’s simply not the season yet. There, I lived on the sixth floor of an old neo-Classical apartment, neatly nestled between two bookstores. The one to my immediate left upon exiting the complex offered a weekly rotation of discounted novellas in a language I could not read. Next to the entrance sat a small Euronet ATM—a tourist trap for the ones who didn’t know any better. The street ahead was noisy, a conglomerate of shouting and honks occasionally suspended by the cadence of the emergency sirens.
The elevator ride up consisted of a narrow nine square feet platform, a full length mirror on one side, and wooden doors on the other that would open at the slightest touch, abruptly halting the ascent. It was a strange experience, for I could never decide how long that climb really took. When I was staring at myself in the mirror, trying to flatten that one stubborn strand of flyaway hair, it felt like mere seconds. Yet on the late nights when not even the heaviness of the walls surrounding me could make me feel safe in a foreign city 7000 kilometers away from home, the seconds felt like hours. Upon entering through the wooden doors of the apartment, a sudden gust of wind would try to push you backwards. Perhaps this had to do with the particular arrangements of the windows—my flatmate and I always preferred to keep them open—or perhaps some ancient spirit was trying to keep strangers out. This was the urban legend my landlady told me when I first arrived, and I never asked her whether she was actually kidding or not. Maybe this explained why the sunlight cast through the windows would always be slightly tinted pink: a shy, gentle ghost. My stay there wasn’t very long, only a mere four months, give or take a few days. I wasn’t particularly attached either, and bid it a light farewell on my last night. But sometimes, whenever I see a slightly chipped gargoyle statue, a wooden elevator, a fridge with a broken freezer door, I would think back to the old place, wondering whether the spirit there was lonely. Someone once told me that whenever they purchased tickets to a place, they always had to book tickets away from that place, as if they did not belong anywhere, and this made them a little sad. I remember only halfheartedly consoling them at the time.
If strictly going by number of years, I’d suppose the place I belong to would be the fourth brick establishment two avenues away from a busy train station, one partially obscured by a fifty-year-old oak. Upon entering, one would first notice the striking smell of some melange of herbs and ancient roots, a scent that seems to cling to me even now. Whenever I return to the house, it was as if I was revisiting some earlier period in time. The walls of my room, in particular, are still adorned with watercolors, oils, and old concert posters from 2010. That was when my family first purchased the place, and as an eager sixth grader, I resolved then to make my room the very best that a child could ever own. It was an open exhibition of all my favorite things: the souvenir model of the first ship that sailed around the globe, a brass pocket watch with hands that rotated counterclockwise, a wonky paperweight of the Milky Way. Yet as I grew older and these things gradually changed, I never really bothered with redecorating. And so, the past stuck to me like an adhesive, a cute little bandaid that is simultaneously endearing and uncomfortably restrictive. I think about tearing it off my skin, how much pain it would cause and how liberating it could be. I think about how, in ten year’s time, I would like to buy a house with high ceilings near the sea. Not the kind next to busy beaches, but a more modest abode isolated enough that it is still socially acceptable to be a little aloof with family, yet one still fairly close to a local grocery to be convenient. A nice place where I can, at regular intervals, remind myself to redecorate minimally. I touched chubby infant fingers today, and was reminded of the first time I held someone else’s hand. It was a cold, sticky sensation, like trying to catch eel barehanded on a winter’s day. I locked eyes with her, curious about her input on the topic, yet her large, black irises reflected nothing in particular.
The second time was like the houseplant I kept, a small, quiet creature. It was a little gullible, so I would occasionally rotate its pot just to see how it would find the sun again. It was the perfect confidant, and I loved how picky it was about my singing: at the slight off-key note, its leaves would curl up in distaste, and at some point, this was the funniest thing in the world to me. But on some days, I can’t figure out the right medium to describe these thoughts with. Something feels off, yet I have too much pride to scrap my own creations. And so I layer the attempts, first impossibly delicately, then hastily so. I call the final opus beautiful for its imperfection—isn’t this just the excuse everyone else uses? This is a list of windows I liked.
Through the first window, the initial phrase that came to mind was nostalgic sunlight. Not a personal nostalgia, but something much older than I. As it strikes the corners of the travel brochure someone left behind, the latter curls up a little, as if stretching after a late noon nap. It casts long shadows across my parents’ blue-tinted wedding photo. The image is newly dusted, though I don’t think my father has smiled so brightly on camera since. The date on the bottom reads 1989. It was always a gamble, whether that second window would close properly. Perhaps it was something more than RNG that rendered it open when I screamed fuck you at some poor passerby taking a stroll that night. Or sometimes it would be closed so that we can still sing songs, written by other people, for other people. Those hours were a little chaotic, but nice. Yakult drinks were nice. The squid snacks were nice. The third window was never really cleaned properly. When someone says New York City, it is always about the brilliant, bold things they meticulously polished, rehearsed a thousand times in front of a mirror only to drink away at some dimly-lit bar one September night. It is never the quiet, forgettable things, musings that ease up their scrunched eyebrows as they rest their heads for a short respite. But I tell myself that sometimes, this dirty window is kind. Sometimes, when the scenery outside is dark and I am the only person on this train, the lights across my city cast through this murky veil look like fireflies. |
Authora little cynical & tired Archives
July 2019
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